


The Teacher and the Visualizer

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Foreshadowing, Friendship, Humour, Memory, TARDIS - Freeform, Time Lords, a tiny bit of angst, clara becoming the doctor, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 19:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9199892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: What would you do if you had access to a device that recorded everything that ever happened in time and space? If you're Clara, you look for the equivalent of funny cat videos and embarrassing old images of the Doctor.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UniverseOnHerShoulders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/gifts).



The Doctor would never admit to dozing off, but on occasion he didn’t mind resting his eyes for a few moments, confident in his cat-like ability to wake to full readiness at the first sign of danger, ready to save the day.

Okay. Maybe that’s overselling it a little.

Confident that the tiny alarm clock he’d made from a spare part from the TARDIS’ food machine could be relied upon to wake the Doctor up in time to save the day. Assuming he remembered to set the alarm.

That’s better.

It had been an exhausting adventure involving a Tetrap, the planet Venus, and a spoon, and even the Doctor had to admit he was knackered by the time they’d returned to the TARDIS. Clara, his companion, had been so exhausted, she actually managed to fall asleep while standing up. Fortunately, she’d been hugging him at the time, so it was easy enough to guide the petite, dark-haired young woman into her bedroom where she’d gratefully allowed herself to perform a perfectly graceful face-plant onto the pillow.

The Doctor had himself dozed off in his favourite chair in the console room. He had a bedroom but he considered it a waste of space (and he’d forgotten where he’d put it anyway), but he’d spent a number of days decorating Clara’s room which he’d presented to her as an anniversary present. The Doctor had to admit replicating the interior of Buckingham Palace was a bit much for a bedroom, but Clara had appreciated the effort and that was all that mattered.

The TARDIS seemed to recognize the relative rarity of the Doctor—to borrow some slang from 20th-century Earth—“zonking out” and had dimmed the console room lights and set her own systems to “quiet running.” She’d briefly considered doing the opposite to Clara, but decided that even by her own standards, that would have been petty.  


So, for several hours, the interior of the TARDIS was as still as a down comforter, the Doctor’s soft snoring one of the only sounds cutting the stillness.  


But then, it was from the direction of Buckingham Palace 2.0 that the Doctor’s sensitive hearing picked up Clara’s bell-like laugh echoing down the corridor. It progressed to a full-out belly laugh of a type he hadn’t heard come from her since the night they went out for dinner with Peter Sellers and Robin Williams.

The Doctor raised his intense, salt-and-pepper eyebrows and opened his eyes. Must be a funny dream, he thought, starting to drift off again. But the laughter only grew more intense.

Suddenly concerned that Clara might have picked up Laughing Fever from their recent visit to Ooski 23, the Doctor pushed himself out of the chair and strode down the corridor.

“Clara?” he asked, only to be greeted by more laughter from behind the closed door to her room. “Clara?” He knocked softly.

“Come … come in!” he heard her breathe between chuckles.

Clara Oswald, professional schoolteacher, amateur saviour of the universe and full-time right-hand person to The Oncoming Storm, was sitting cross-legged on her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks as she looked at a tablet-sized computer propped up on a pillow. The Doctor was prepared to make a crack about her wasting time watching funny cat videos on YouTube rather than getting needed restorative sleep, but then he recognized instead the TARDIS’ portable Time and Space Visualizer (Mark III).

It was a device the Doctor used earlier in his lives to view historic events or review past adventures and occasionally show off to his companions. It captured light neurons that recorded virtually every event in time and space and relayed them into images on a screen. Unfortunately, it was useless for viewing recordings of potential future events, so no peeking at the end chapter the next time the Doctor was imprisoned by the Daleks, and he’d long ago realized experiences were more rewarding in person than watched on TV. Why view Shakespeare sitting at his desk writing _Hamlet_ when you could be standing over his shoulder reminding the Bard that Horatio was spelled with only one R and that holding up a skull was more dramatic than hoisting a femur. So, for that (and other) reasons, the Doctor had stopped using it ages before, even though the TARDIS kept updating the device from time to time. They did make handy doorstops, though.

“How did you get your hands on that thing, Clara?”

“Captain Grumpy showed it to me while bow-tie you and Mr. Sandshoes were busy contacting your past selves before you saved Gallifrey,” Clara said, matter-of-factly. “You were using it to wedge open a door, see?” She showed the Doctor the scuff marks on the back of the device.

“Which door, Clara? Not the one with the big sign saying, ‘This door must never close’?”

“Don’t panic. I used a chair to prop it open. Why does it have to be kept open, anyway?”

“There are some secrets I can never tell,” the Doctor said, darkly, before changing the subject. “So, you know how it works, then?”

“You … he… showed me how to turn it on and search for images—not too different from Google, really—so I thought I’d … take a look around.” With that, Clara looked a little guilty. “I’m not causing any ripples or tidal waves in time by doing this, am I? I don’t even know how it does what it does—you just told me ‘magic’ and I went with the flow.”

“You can’t alter or impact events, Clara, if that’s what you’re worried about, and the Laws of Time—and a built-in failsafe—won’t allow you to look ahead in your own timestream or that of anyone with a direct connection to you, such as myself or your relatives or the disruptive influences you refer to as students, so you’re safe,” the Doctor said before frowning. “But I find sometimes you can see things you probably shouldn’t.”

Clara’s laughter tailed away. “I did look in on you, though. An older you. Or younger you. A whatever you. Picked a random date back in the 1970s—or it might have been the 1980s—and watched while you were fixing up a really cool-looking yellow antique car at UNIT HQ.”

The Doctor smiled. “Ah, yes—Bessie. Good old Bessie. I carried her in the TARDIS for a while but I decided she was just taking up space so I donated her to the UNIT museum. The one rank-and-file UNIT personnel can actually remember visiting as opposed to the Black Archive, of course. So how did I look?”

Clara cocked an eyebrow. “Getting a bit vain in our old age, aren’t we?”

The Doctor gave her a “seriously?” expression and she smiled back.

“You looked amazing. Almost as good as you do now-um, er …” Clara’s comment dissolved into nervous stammering. “Uh, that is, I mean …”

“So I wasn’t sick then?”

“Uh … no.” Okay, the Doctor had missed it. Again. Situation normal, Clara thought.

“So what was so funny?”

“ _Mmm_?”

“I could hear you laughing all the way down at the console room,” the Doctor said.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Did I ever tell you that you live the best life ever?”

“Which one? I’ve had thirteen…ish…so far.”

“All of them. I mean, who else gets to see the Frankenstein Monster body-slam a Dalek!”

“A monster doing a what-now?”

“Oh come on, Doctor! You had to have seen it! Anywhere there’s a Dalek, there’s you. I learned that years ago.”

She turned the screen towards the Doctor. And, sure enough, in the foyer of a gothic-looking establishment, the Monster—flattened head, neck bolts, generally rocking the whole Karloff esthetic—heaved a protesting Dalek into the air and smashed it down to the ground. It bounced, much to the Doctor’s surprise.

It took a moment for him to remember where he’d seen the Monster before. Of course, it wasn’t Mary Shelley’s true Frankenstein Monster; he’d dealt with that one several lives back and he even travelled with Mary herself for a while. He finally recalled the circumstances: a chase across space and time with the Daleks in pursuit. There was Ian and Barbara and dear Vicki, of course. He met Steven for the first time during that adventure, too. But he’d had to say goodbye to Ian and Barbara, just as he’d had to say goodbye to Susan not long before. They all leave me in the end, don’t they, he thought. Even Clara. No—the Doctor shook himself to drop the thought. Clara was with him now, that’s all that mattered. 

“I never actually saw the Monster do that; we’d already escaped,” he said.

“So what happened? Dalek Invasion of Hollywood?” Clara laughed as she watched the footage again and wondered if she could hook the visualizer to her laptop so she could make an animated GIF loop from it. One condition for being allowed access to UNIT’s Black Archive was a lifetime ban on social media, but there was always Courtney Woods’ Tumblr. 

The Doctor answered her question. “Dalek Invasion of Ghana, more like. It was supposed to be part of a festival they held there in 1996, but they had to cancel the haunted house because sponsorship financing from China fell through. But the attraction had already been constructed featuring state-of-the-art animatronics and rudimentary AI to recreate the Monster, as well as Count _Drag-u-lah_.” The Doctor drew out the name, Lugosi-style.

Clara winced. “Don’t. Don’t do that.” The Doctor scowled back. “So they were kind of alive, then?”

“As much as an automaton with primitive AI programming can be alive, I suppose. And they were individually powered. I found out later the Monster broke free of the exhibit and did a minor rampage around the festival grounds before it got run over by a bus.”

“Ouch.”

“Imagine their surprise at the autopsy. So, any other events from my life you found funny?”

“That outfit you wore between the cricket player you and the first Scottish you. Made my eyes water. I feel sorry for Penny-”

“-Peri-” the Doctor corrected.

“-Peri,” Clara continued. “Mind you, she wasn’t much better with her Day-Glo leotard tops.”

“Remember, she was from the 1980s,” the Doctor chided. “You’d have been wearing something similar if you were a young adult back then. And don’t think I didn’t notice you copying one of Jo Grant’s looks after we got back from that thing with UNIT, that detective from Los Angeles and the earlier me you were just ogling. _And_ I saw your photo album with those pictures of you from about ten years back, so you should talk.”

“Listen, spray-on tans were the big thing back then,” Clara chucked, a bit more defensively than she intended. “Better than risking skin cancer. And at least spray-on tans wash off. Some of the girls I went to school with got into things like leg snake tattoos. I got the better end of the bargain.”

Clara took another look at the visualizer. “I suppose I could call up some pretty embarrassing stuff with this,” she mused. 

“What do you mean? As if my sartorial sense from half my lives ago wasn’t enough?”

“Oh, I don’t know—like the time you wore a fairy costume to the UNIT Christmas party and got snogged silly by Bonnie?”

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Then why don’t we call up that time you learned to play a telepathic game with an alien from the planet Thera and ended up pregnant?” The Doctor looked triumphant at the one-upmanship.

“Uh, Doctor, that was an episode of _Star Trek: Enterprise_ we watched that day you kept me company at my flat because I was off sick with the flu,” Clara said.

“No it wasn’t.”

“Do you want me to call up a visual of us watching TV? I’m getting quite good at using this thing, you know,” she smiled. 

“Okay, okay, I’ll take your word for it,” the Doctor replied. “Since you’re no longer unconscious, want some breakfast? We can nip over to Julia Child’s place, circa 1943. She was with the OSS at the time helping to develop a shark repellant to keep sharks from blowing up allied torpedoes by getting in the way, but that doesn’t have any bearing on her ability to make a killer omelette, I assure you.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll get showered and dressed,” Clara said, swinging her legs off the bed and reaching around herself in preparation for pulling her top off. She nearly began the operation before noticing the Doctor was still standing in the room.

“Uh, I’ll join you in the console room?” she said.

“What? Oh—yes, sorry. I’ll just—yes, well…” the Doctor stammered as he left Clara to her own devices.

***

About fifteen minutes later, a newly refreshed Clara breezed into the console room, giving the Doctor a quick squeeze from behind as she did so. Someday, the Doctor thought, I’ll have to speak to her about her penchant for unsolicited hugging. Eventually. Maybe. 

“Ready to meet Ms. Child?” the Doctor asked.

Clara nodded. And then frowned slightly as the Doctor handed her a slip of paper. “Hey, these are co-ordinates. You don’t mean…”

“Time to take the stabilizers off, Clara. You’ve been watching and learning for a long time. I want you to pilot us to 1943.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Clara said. She knew that the Doctor allowed very few individuals to pilot the TARDIS—hell, the _TARDIS_ allowed very individuals to pilot the TARDIS—and she didn’t take this sign of trust lightly. “Thank you.”

As the Doctor observed, Clara quickly entered the numbers into the console, then took a few moments to check and recheck that she hadn’t missed one or mistyped another. She had no desire to end up in the French Revolution or the middle of the Seventh World War. Once she was certain all the numbers were right—and trusting that _the Doctor_ had copied them down correctly to start with, she uttered a quiet “Be nice” to the TARDIS and pulled the dematerialization lever. 

There was usually a momentary pause between the lever pull and the familiar groaning and wheezing that indicated the TARDIS had entered the Time Vortex. It may have only been a second or so, but to Clara the pause felt like forever. But then the wonderful noise kicked in and they were off.

A few moments later, a bass-like thump indicated rematerialization had occurred. Clara looked over at the Doctor and he nodded with a beaming smile. “See for yourself,” he replied to the unvoiced question.

Clara checked the dials and determined that they’d indeed landed in the right location, in the right year. They were about an hour earlier than they were aiming to land, but for this TARDIS, such accuracy was worth celebrating.

“Congratulations, Clara. You are well on your way to becoming a Time Lord,” the Doctor said.

“Wait, don’t I need two hearts for that?”

“Since when have rules meant anything to us?” the Doctor laughed.

“I’m going to need a Time Lord name, aren’t I?” Clara said, playing along. “Don’t you take the name of the street you grew up on and then add in your favourite pet’s name or something?”

“We aren’t professional wrestlers, Clara. No, wait; forgot about the Corsair’s sixth life. Forget I said wrestler. Anyway, some Time Lords choose a special name and they treat it like a promise, but others go by their real names, like Romana. You should hear Missy’s real name—I don’t blame her for sticking with the moniker. But I think Clara Oswald is a perfectly good Time Lord name.”

“I was thinking ‘the Teacher’ or ‘the Impossible Girl,’” Clara mused as she went to retrieve her jacket from the hat stand. It was apparently late fall outside.

“You’re not a comic book superhero, Clara,” the Doctor chuckled. “I like ‘the Teacher’ though. I might start calling you that.”

“Nah, you calling me Teacher might sound a bit weird,” Clara said.

“Why not? I’ve learned a lot from you.” The Doctor reached into his pocket and withdrew a set of white, well-thumbed index cards that Clara had made up for him as cheat-sheets when he had to deal with people. True, he’d messed up the first time he’d used them with the personnel at the Drum base, but then she’d made him all but memorize the set and they’d come in useful. 

Clara smiled as she saw the cards. “You just like being told what to do.”

“Hey, you’re not the boss of me. I always take what you tell me under advisement-”

“-and then you…”

“…do exactly as you say. Yes, boss.” He winked. “Well, Julia Child probably has spies to catch. She can’t be waiting around all day for us to turn up for brekkies. After you.”

Clara opened the door and took in rather peaceful urban setting that was revealed outside. It was hard to believe it was the middle of the Second World War. She stopped in the threshold and turned to her companion.

“Doctor, tell me something. Why don’t you use that visualizer? It was fun and all to snoop around, but I can see how it could be useful.”

The Doctor turned serious as he leaned in the doorway. “Clara, how tempted were you to look back on your mother, on Danny?”

“Very tempted.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Because it wasn’t like watching a home video or flipping through a photo album. The images on that thing are real, too real. And if I’d seen them, I… I don’t know how I might have reacted.” Clara looked down. “You really wouldn’t want me to pilot the TARDIS to the edge of another volcano? Sorry. Bad joke.”

The Doctor slipped an arm around Clara’s shoulders. “Now imagine what it must be like for me. There are so many people that I’ve known, that I’ve … had to say goodbye to or were taken from me. If I let myself get lost in the visualizer, I’d never be able to move on. Even you. I told you once during one of my more ‘melodramatic’ moments that if I ever lost you I … well, I wouldn’t handle it well. The last thing I would need is to use something like the visualizer to remind me.” The Doctor suddenly found himself unable to look Clara in the eyes for a moment. “My turn to be sorry … getting morbid again.”

“Well, don’t worry, Doctor. I plan to live forever. I’ve been doing research,” Clara smiled slyly, working hard to turn the mood. On the Doctor’s skeptical look, she added: “Really. I’ve even got the regeneration thing worked out.”

“How?”

“There’s this spa in Beverly Hills in the year 2054 that promises a ‘new you’—a top-to-bottom change—so if I ever get tired of this face, I’ll just go get a new one.”

“I can’t imagine ever getting tired of that face.”

“You should talk. You’re only stuck with yours for a few years at a time.” Clara exited the TARDIS and then turned to look at the Doctor, an eyebrow cocked. “You do realize that you just flirted with me a little, right?”

“Maybe we might want to keep that between ourselves,” the Doctor said, conspiratorially. “Might give people the wrong impression.”

“Yeah. It’s not like there’s anyone recording this, right?”

**Author's Note:**

> For [Universe On Her Shoulders](http://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders) as thanks for her gifting me her fun story, ["The Christmas Spirit"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9132043), which is referenced here (the UNIT Christmas party).
> 
> The story was inspired by an ani-gif I saw of the Frankenstein Monster body-slamming a Dalek in an episode of the William Hartnell story, "The Chase." And it just went from there...
> 
> The Time-Space Visualizer also first appeared in "The Chase". And as far as I'm aware it never appeared again. The technobabble about how it works comes from that story. The original version was a big floor unit, but I assumed that over time, like everything else, a new smaller model would have eventually emerged. Even if the Doctor just uses it as a doorstop.
> 
> The adventure I allude to regarding UNIT and a 1970s Los Angeles detective is a story I've been playing around with for months and have yet to post.


End file.
